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A REVIEW 



OF SOME POINTS IX 



BOPP'S COMPARATIVE GRAMMAR. 



BY 



LEONARD TAFEL, PH. D., PHILADELPHIA, AND PROFESSOR 
RUDOLPH L TAFEL, ST. LOUIS. 



[From the Bibliotheca Sacra for October, 1861.] 



ANDOVER: 
PRINTED BY WARREN F. DRAPER, 

18.6 1. 



THIS BOOK 



is the Property of 



PETER LESLEY, 



18 63. 



'^^ Of the American Philosoptic^^ ^ y 



A REVIEW 



OF SOME POINTS IN 



BOPP'S COMPARATIVE GRAMMAR. 



BY 



LEONARD TAFEL, PH. D., PHILADELPHIA, AND PROFESSOR 
' I RUDOLPH L TAFEL, ST. LOUIS. 
\ 



[From the Bibliotheca Sacra for October, 1861.] 



ANDO VE R : 
PRINTED BY WARREN F. DRAPER 

1861 






sn^ 



•ife 

>B. K. Buali-Br«wn 

May 1016 



A REVIEW OF SOME POINTS IN BOPP'S COMPARATIVE 

GRAMMAR.^ 



BT LEONARD TAFEL, PH. D., PHILADELPHIA, AND PROFESSOR RUDOLPH 
L. TAFEL, ST. LOUIS.'' 

On reviewing the labors of the modern scholars in the prov- 
ince of language, we find that in Germany especially they 
have cultivated this field in almost all possible directions, and 
although they frequently seem to arrive at contradictory 
results, these results, nevertheless, are necessarily supple- 
mentary to each other, and advance the cause of philology 
as a whole. While the adherents of the old school confine 
their studies to the classical languages, and devote them- 
selves more to the cultivation of^sjjntax, the modern school, 
or that of comparative phiJolpg^j,;aft?)r starting many and 
sometimes absurd hypotheses;. have-'^t length arrived at a 
profound knowledge of the laws of analogy, which none of 
its followers could violate with impunity in his investiga- 
tions. Indeed, the growth of the various grammatical 
formations in the languages belonging to the Indo-Euro- 
pean stock has been so clearly traced out by this school, 
and is so well supported by facts, that it may be safely 
asserted that future investigations must rest upon them as 
their foundation. These investigations of comparative phi- 
lology, moreover, throw hght on many hitherto dark portions 
of history, proving from the common stock of w^ords and 
the cognate development of the forms of their languages 



1 Comparative Grammar of the Sanscrit, Zend, Armenian, Greek, Latin, 
Litthuanian, Old Slavonian, Gothic, and German Lano:uages. By Franz Bojjp. 
Second Edition. Reviewed throughout. Berlin: 1857-60. 

^ Our thanks are due to our learned friend. Professor Chas. Short, of Phila- 
delphia, for his valuable assistance in the preparation of this Article. 



that many detached nations of the present day belong to 
the same race, and were originally united. Indeed, compar- 
ative philology even points out the length of the period 
when they were thus united, and the time when they sep- 
arated, and it furnishes information as to the state of the 
mental culture of these aboriginal people and their mode o± 
living, and thus supplies the place of direct historical docu- 
ments. 

To Mr. Bopp is due the praise of having acted as a pio- 
neer in this new field of human science, but around him 
have gathered other congenial minds, and under his leader- 
ship they have fought bravely against all kinds of opposition 
in order to plant securely the standard of their new science. 
Mr. Bopp has been enabled to lay before the learned public 
a new edition of his Comparative Grammar, which, accord- 
ing to his own statement, has been entirely remodelled. A 
few weak positions have been abandoned, because they were 
untenable, and others taken in their place which are in ad- 
vance of the former. This new edition may be regarded as 
a very complete repertory of all investigations made by Mr. 
Bopp and others since the publication of his first edition. 
The learned author has subjected all theories put forth by 
others to a close scrutiny, and has either adopted or refuted 
them. Most of the positions taken by this great scholar 
are now established beyond any doubt, but he himself will 
acknowledge that there are some points still open to dis- 
cussion, and a few of these we propose to reconsider. 

Mr. Bopp's laws of sounds, as they are developed in the 
second edition, will probably not be disputed by any one. 
OA page 9 he opposes those Sanscrit Grammarians, who, 
according to a later pronunciation in India, admit the tran- 
sition of an original a as in sofa, into e as in bed, and into 
o as in not, as has been done in the earliest stages of the 
Greek language, and also in the Zend. But the fact thai 
the short vowels e and o did not exist in the Old Sanscrit, 
any more than in the oldest Germanic dialect of which we 
have knowledge, is proved by Mr. Bopp by the considera- 
tion "^'that, suppose even these sounds to have existed while 



the Sanscrit was a living language, they could only have 
been developed from a short a after Sanscrit writing had 
become fixed ; because in its alphabet, where the minutest 
shades of sound are noticed, the distinction between «, e, 
and 0, would certainly not have been neglected " (I. 9). 
The fact that the sound of e was developed from a 3.t a. 
later period, is also proved by the Semitic languages, and 
especially by the Arabic, in which, at the present day, the 
sound of a has been retained by the Bedouins, the Sons of 
the Desert, with whom the vowels were less subject to 
change ; while in the settled communities it has passed 
over into other sounds. The same thing we find in the 
Ethiopic, where the original Semitic a has frequently passed 
into the weaker sound of e, and the vowel i has always 
been changed into e. 

As regards the weight of the three fundamental vowels, 
a, w, if Mr. Bopp, to the best of our knowledge, was the 
first to point out the difference in gravity between these 
vowels, a subject which has also been discussed by us in 
our criticism on Mr. Corssen's work on Latin Pronuncia- 
tion.i Mr. Bopp starts with those Sanscrit verbs in which 
a long a is changed into i in places where other verbs 
undergo other changes, and where, for instance, yoondmi, 
jung-o, yooneemasy jungimus, and also emi, instead of the 
older aimi, elfiL^ I go, Plural, t/^ez^, may be compared. In the 
Gothic tongue, which in Mr. Bopp's grammar is the repre- 
sentative of the Germanic languages, this weakening of a 
into i, which is done to lighten the vowel, is most clearly 
seen in the verbs of Grimm's tenth, eleventh, and twelfth 
conjugations, where in the singular of the preterite, on 
account of its monosyllabic nature, a radical a has been 
preserved, while in the present tense, and all other forms 
dependent upon it, on account of the greater number of 
syllables, it has been weakened into i. Thus, at, I ate, bears 
the same relation to ita, I eat, as the Latin cano to cecini, 



' Latin Pronunciation and the Latin Alphabet, by Dr. L. Tafel and Prop. R. 
L. Tafel. Mason & Brothers : New York. 18C0. 

1* 



capio to accipio. The Sanscrit, he continues, proves in all 
those verbs where a comparison can be instituted, that in 
the above-named Gothic conjugations, in the singular of 
the preterite tense, the genuine radical vowel has been pre- 
served ; and among these verbs he mentions, at , J ate (also 
in the third person), sat, I sat; vas, I remained, I was; 
vrack, I pursued; ga-vag, I inoved; frah, I asked; gvam, I 
came; bar, I bare, bore; ga-tar, I tare, tore, I destroyed ; 
band, I bound; saying, in conclusion, that " henceforth, in 
historical grammar, the letter a of the above-named preter- 
ites, and of all other similar forms, can no longer be re- 
garded as a permutation of the vowel i of the present 
tense, for the sake of expressing the past, however, it may 
appear so far from a survey of the Germanic languages 
only, inasmuch as the reduplication, the proper means for 
expressing this relation of time, has either entirely vanished 
in these preterites, or else can no longer be distinguished, 
on account of contraction, as in etum, ive ate, setum, we 
satP 

We are pleased to see that Mr. Bopp, in taking this 
ground, has advanced considerably beyond the positions he 
took in the first edition, § 1 — 7, where he treats of the same 
subject. He now admits that the root of the preterite is 
more primitive, and that the present (as well as the imper- 
ative mood, as w^e shall presently see) has been shortened 
from it, and we are convinced that Mr. Bopp will finally 
admit that not only the primitive form, but also the primi- 
tive signification, of the verb was that of the preterite 
or aorist. 

It may, indeed, appear preposterous to enter into any 
discussions about the forms of language, when man first 
expressed his thoughts by words. But both the arguments 
of reason, and the vestiges of the earlier stages of the 
development of various languages, enable us to draw con- 
clusions, chiefly negative, but partly positive, as to some 
sounds which could not have been used in those aboriginal 
times, and also as to some grammatical forms which could 
not have been primitive ; while, on the other hand, aided 



by the history of language, we are enabled to specify those 
forms which are naost ancient, or at least are comparatively 
most ancient. 

As regards the origin of language, unless we suppose that 
language sprang forth from the head of the primitive man, 
ready furnished, as Minerva from the head of Jupiter, we must 
assume that language, like all other attainments of man, 
was made gradually ; and if we admit that the first man, in 
speaking, as well as in thinking, was instructed by Deity 
himself,^ we must farther grant that the Divine Being in this, 
as in all other cases, has followed his own pre-established 
order, to which he subjected himself in the process of his 
incarnation, the order, namely, of educational progress. If 
this be so, then the first man, when intending to express by 
words his feelings, intentions, and thoughts, was assisted 
or instructed by the Divine Being; but this assistance or 
instruction was conformed to man's first mental wants 
which were obviously very few and simple, and such, we 
hence infer, were the primitive forms of language.^ The 
original forms were successively developed and modified, 
until, at last, they attained to that fulness of growth and 
perfection which appeared necessary to the various tribes, 
races, or nations. We shall confine our remarks to the 
Arian or Indo-European family of languages, with occa- 
sional references to the Semitic tongues, which offer some 
striking analogies in what appear to us their primitive for- 
mations. After these languages had, as it were, reached 
their highest point of bodily growth, their mental growth 
began to prevail; and the more their intellectual strength 
increased, the less it was necessary to retain all those exter- 
nal minutiae of grammatical forms which were developed 
in the earlier stages of the language, since those using it 
understood others, and were likely to be understood by 



' It is proved by incontrovertible evidence that new-born babes, when left to 
themselves, or exposed among beasts, do not learn to think or speak ; and when 
left among beasts utter only sounds in imitation of those of beasts. 

'■^ The demonstrative pronoun sin, for instance, in the older Hebrew, meant 
both he and she, and ny:, a youth of both sexes, a hoy or a girl. 



8 
I 

others, even when, in expressing their thoughts, they dis- 
pensed with these external grammatical inflections. There 
is, however, no necessary reason why all members of the 
same family of languages should have branched out to the 
same extent, and have produced the same amount of gram- 
matical forms. Just as in nature all trees of the same 
genus or species have not the same growth, nor do all the 
members of the same family of men attain the same stat- 
ure or the same bodily or mental perfection. Thus, of all 
the Arian tongues, the Greek and Latin only have generated 
a pluperfect (as the Syriac also among the Semitic idioms), 
the Latin only a future perfect in the active, and the Greek 
in the passive voice; so, likewise, there w^asa diversity in 
the number of cases, in the use of the dual and plural, etc. 
If this be so, we are not authorized to maintain, as is 
frequently done by Mr. Bopp and his school, that all 
these languages, in the ante-historical times, were provided 
with the same number of forms, but subsequently dropped 
them. 

Nevertheless, there are in the words and the forms of words 
many indications that the Arian, as well as the Semitic 
nations, originally constituted one people, and, in the ante- 
historical ages, spent a part of their youth together ; after 
which they separated, and each developed itself in its own 
way, until at last they attained the maximum of their 
growth. Of this primitive language some idioms have 
preserved one, and others another, heirloom, as it were ; but 
they all agree in this, that they retain more or less of the 
vestiges of that simple tense (the preterite or aorist), the 
priority of which it is a dictate of reason to acknowledge. 
For the first thing in order which a man would naturally 
express by speech was a phenomenon, or an act or fact com- 
pleted. That form by which this realization was expressed, 
and which seems to have been originally monosyllabic, as in 
German, we call the Aorist, or, as is done in the Semitic 
tongues (the Chaldee, Syriac, Samaritan, Hebrew, Ethiopic, 
Arabic), the Perfect tense, in contradistinction from the 
Imperfect tense, that is, the tense and mood of non-reality or 



9 

uncompletedness. This form, naturally demanded by reason 
as the original one, we find in the German, and, as we have 
seen above, in the Sanscrit ; it is likewise found (even with- 
out the suffix of the pronoun, as in the German in the 
strong form) in the Semitic idioms, this being the most sim- 
ple ; and we meet with it also, in the Slavonic, Lithuanian, 
and Greek, where the pronoun, in its oldest form, is ap- 
pended to the root. 

As regards Mr. Bopp's assertion that the proper means of 
expressing the past tense, the reduplication, had disappeared 
from the language, or had become disguised, we cannot agree 
with him. The reduplicated form could not have been the 
original one; because the simple form must first have existed 
before it could be reduplicated, and the first simple form, as 
we have seen above, expressed something which had taken 
place, and thus, at least by implication, had reference to the 
past. We hold. that the reduplication is a subsequent for- 
mation, which was introduced, after the aorist form, by its 
being employed also for the imperative mood, had appeared 
to be more vague ; and, moreover, reduplication does not 
seem to have ever been generally adopted. 

On page 144, Mr. Bopp assumes two contradictory pro- 
cesses in language, to explain the same thing. In a foot- 
note he observes that, according to Dobrowsky (pp. 39-41), 
the transition of gutturals to sibilants, through the retro-ac- 
ting influence of a following soft vowel, is very evident in 
the Slavonic languages. But, in the aorist-ending ')(U and 
^(pmu, of the first person singular and plural, in da')(ii and 
da-^omu, he derives the guttural from an original sibilant, and 
starts the hypothesis, that the aspirate ^^ in the Slavonic 
languages, is of a comparatively later origin, and only took 
its rise after the Lettic languages had separated from the 
strictly Slavonic tongues. He says, also, that in the Lithua- 
nian language we find k in the place of an original sibilant, 
as (p. 143), Lith. jukka, black soup, Slav, jwxfi, compared 
with Sanscrit, ?/M5'a-s (masc), ^i^s'awt (neut), lj3.t jus, juris ^ 
iromjusis; and in the Lithuanian imperative mood, ending 
in ki, and ki-te, in which, he says, he recognizes the aorist 



10 

of the potential mood (Gr. Optative) ; on this account he 
holds the letter k in Lith. dUki-te to be identical with the 
Slavonic ;\; in 6i?<2p^?/, I gave, da-^omu, we gave, and with the 
Sanscrit s in dd-si-dvdm, you 7night give. He, moreover, 
mentions incidentally, that formerly the preterite ending in 
XU (which is proved to have been originally %am) was sup- 
posed to be related to the ending -Ka of the Greek perfect, 
and refers to Grimm's Grammar I. p. 1059, and to Dobrow- 
sky's Grammar, I. 2, § 19, and 7, § 90. The latter scholar 
regards the letter % as a part of the personal ending, and we 
think his view is right, and shall endeavor to prove it else- 
where. If Mr. Bopp considers the letter k in diiki-te, to be 
identical with the Slavonic % in da^ih he ought still more to 
have regarded it as identical with the Greek k in the aorists 
eBcoKa, e^Tj/ca, rjKa, which we shall discuss below, than the k 
of the Greek perfect tense. We need not decide which of 
these three letters, /cjx^^ ^^^ oldest ; but if. Mr. Bopp (§ 23) 
maintains that the letter h in aham, is to be pronounced like 
a soft ^; if, moreover, u in ')(U stands for um or om, and this 
again stands in the place of am, as in the Lithuanian pres- 
ent, we should have to regard da-'^u or da[a]xti (instead of 
da')(am in the Slavonic aorist) as one of the oldest formations 
in the Arian languages ; and, so long as Mr. Bopp does not 
prove to us from an ante-Lettic or ante-Slavonic monument, 
that is, from a monument dating from the time when these 
two languages were not yet separated, that their common 
aorist sounded exclusively sam or as-am, and not %am, so 
long we shall consider ourselves authorized to maintain, 
that the Slavonic form is the more archaic, or the older, and 
that the Lithuanian sam or sau was either weakened from 
')(am or x'^^i ^^'j ^^ ^^ more commonly supposed, was a com- 
position of the verbal root with the substantive verb asam. 
And, as regards the fact that in the Sanscrit language, which 
possesses the oldest written documents in the world, the 
verbs are only found with the ending sam, it does not hence 
follow that its forms also are always the oldest; nor are 
they generally regarded as such by the learned. 

We suppose, that many scholars are not altogether satis- 



11 

fied that our leaders in philology regard it as a settled mat- 
ter, that the personal pronoun of the first person singular in 
the nominative case is of a difierent root from that of the 
oblique cases. Mr. Bopp says (§ 326) : " All languages here 
treated agree in this remarkable particular, that the nomina- 
tive singular of the first person is of a different root from 
that of the oblique cases." The nominative in question 
sounds thus in these different languages : Sanscr. aham^ I\ 
Zend. asem\ Gr €700; Lat. ego\ Goth, ik] Lith. as' {ash)] 
Old Slav. asu\ Armen. es. The original form aka7n, the 
existence of which we shall prove, which is preserved in the 
Sanscr. axam (aham), and, as we have shown above, in the 
Old Slavonic suffixes, had the letter k or x assibilated even 
in the Vedo- Sanscrit plural asame, asme, in the place of 
a^pie^ (which latter form still survives in the Slavonic) ; in 
the Zend, asem ; in the Old Slavonic pronoun am for amm^ 
asom^ asam, from a^am ; in the Lithuanian as'- (ash) and the 
Armenian es^ where the vowel-sound of the second syllable 
was moreover dropped ; while the strong guttural remained 
in the Gothic ik ; Ang. Sax. ik^ Dutch ic, but was weakened 
into the middle in the Icelandic eg ; Swed. jag^ pronounced 
yag^ and, also, t/ah,J)a.n. jeg, pronounced yeg, also yeh, with 
eh as ey in they ; in the Latin and Greek it was also weak- 
ened into the middle, but, while they lost the final m or w, 
they still preserved the preceding vowel ; in the German, how- 
ever, the strong guttural became aspirated into ^y ^"^ i^ 
some of its dialects ^ was reduced to h. 

Mi\ Bopp's supposition, that in the Sanscrit the second 
syllable of the first person does not constitute an essential 
part of the pronoun, because there are some other pronouns 
terminating in this same syllable, we think ought not to be 
admitted. For, Jirsl, these endings are not found in a sin- 
gle one of these pronouns in any other language, and thus 
they are either simply accidental, or else they were formed 
by an imitation of the pronoun of the first person. Sec- 
ondly, the fact that the ending am is not merely an idle 
appendage, but an essential ingredient of this pronoun, is 
clearly proved by this consideration, that this last syllable 



12 

of the pronoun has been preserved in all the primitive for- 
mations of the verb, in the oldest languages of the Arian 
stock. If, now, this syllable forms an integral part of the 
root, that is, if it was regarded as belonging to the orig- 
inal root, and was used as a suffix in the formation of the 
first person of the verb, this very root, which became subse- 
quently somewhat changed wherever it was not used as a 
suffix, appears in its most original form in the Greek eya-oO, 
ifx-oL^ ijjL'i, in the adjective e/^-o?, for which we even find, in 
the dialects, the more original form ayit-o?, and even d/ju-e, 
instead of ifju-e. Compare Buttmann, Ausfuehrliche Gram- 
matik, § 72, pp. 291—293. 

By deriving the Vedic nominative plural asmS' from 
asame =^ asamoi or asamai, we no longer need the hypothetic 
form sma, which was called into requisition by Mr. Bopp as 
a Deus ex machina ; but we agree with him in this, that in 
the Greek plural afju/me^, the letter <7, by assimilation, passed 
over into />t, as in ifi/jLt from eV/it'; we also believe that in 
the Armenian form smes (for sames)^ there is still a trace 
left of the original s. 'Afih (Ace. ayite), on the other hand, 
which Mr. Buttmann, in the above paragraph, teaches to 
have been another form for rjijueh, we would trace back imme- 
diately to aham, where, after the initial a had been cast 
off, the letter s, a sign of the plural, was added by means 
of the connective e. H with the hard breathing in 37/^6??, 
which, according to the best of our knowledge, neither 
Mr. Bopp nor Mr. Buttmann has attempted to explain, 
is best accounted for in this manner, viz. the initial a 
was placed after the breathing letter, and aa, after coalescing 
into a, was weakened into tj. When this pronoun was 
subsequently used as a suffix, the letter A, as frequently 
happens, was lost, but, as we shall see, it was retained in the 
first aorist passive, where it aspirated the preceding demon- 
strative T. 

As regards the origin of the Sanscrit (and, consequently, 
of the Greek) augment as described by Mr. Bopp (I. 415 if. 
§ 557), we confess that we did not expect to find this 
explanation retained in the second edition ; since it appears 



13 

to us too artificial, too far-fetched, and too illogical. Mr. 
Bopp maintains that the augment in the Sanscrit (and thus 
also in the Greek) arose from the alpha privativum. To 
this we object for the following grounds. First, we see no 
reason whatever why the alpha privativum should not have 
been retained, but changed into e, of which change of this 
prefix we do not find a single instance in Greek. Secondly, 
if, according to Mr. Bopp, the object of the alpha privativum 
was to deny that the predicating verb is found in the present 
tense, Mr. Vorlander in his Grundlinien einer organischen 
Wissenschaft der Seele, is perfectly right in objecting to this 
assumption of Mr. Bopp by saying that a simple negation 
of the present does not yet imply the past. Mr. Bopp in this, 
as in his whole doctrine of the verb, starts with the wrong 
idea that the present tense is the original form, and that the 
other tenses are derived from it. The simple a pn'on con- 
sideration that a tense which expresses an incomplete action, 
or an action in the process of being performed, and which 
in the Old Slavonic is absolutely employed to express the 
future, could not have been the original tense, ought to be 
sufficient to prove the fallacy of this assumption. Thirdly, 
the usually lengthened form of the present tense indicates 
a posteriori, that this form had a later and more gradual 
origin, while the form of the so-called second aorist, or of 
the strong preterites which have been discussed above, 
which form is the sajne as the simple one of the imperfect 
tense, e. g. in eXeyov, ecjyrjv (Buttmann, AusfUhrliche Gram- 
matik, § 109, Anmerk. 3), as every one may see from his 
own reading, bears all the traces of originality, inasmuch as 
in its formation, as we shall soon show, the pronouns are 
immediately appended to the simple root. If, now, this 
tense, expressing the past, was the older form, and if the 
idea of the past was inherent in it from the first, it is utterly 
impossible for the augment to express the negation of the 
present tense, which tense arose much later; but the origin 
of the augment belongs to a later period in language, and, 
although Mr. Buttmann did not keep pace with the modern 
school of linguistics, yet, by his more refined sense for lan- 

2 



14 

guage, he was led to see the real state of things, and he 
described the augment as a wearing off of the [more] origi- 
nal reduplication. His own words are : 

" From this circumstance alone, that both augments [the 
augment proper and the reduplication] belong exclusively to 
the preterites, we may presume that they are of the same 
origin. Without entering into any psychological disquisi- 
tions on the subject, we can well conceive how the old lan- 
guage would make use of the reduplication in order to 
express something past. Since the greater part of the 
changes, brought about in language in a mechanical way, 
consist in blunting and wearing off a form, and since, es- 
pecially, we meet in other instances with a wearing off of 
the first letters in Greek words (see § 26, Anmerk. II., 6a')(p^ 
for /Aoo-;^09; OTTa^o^^ r/yavov, for K6TTa^o<;, rrjyavov] rjixl, rjv, rj^ 
for (j^rj/jbL, (prjv, <^ri ; alyjrrjpo^i, Xacyjrrjpo^i ; et/Soj, A,e//3a) ; ala, for 
ryala; la for /^ta, etc.), it is perfectly an alagous to assume 
that the reduplicated syllable containing an e was reduced 
to a mere e, and that the desire of drawing distinctions, 
availing itself of this feature, employed it particularly in 
the narrative style. This assumption, moreover, is fully 
proved (1) by the existing reduplication of the verb in some 
cases passing over into a mere e, and (2) by the second 
aorist instead of having its regular augment being still 
found in the Epic with the reduplication of the perfect, as 
in ireifKr^yov^ XeKa^ea^ai^ etc." 

We are not at all satisfied with the manner in which Mr. 
Bopp (§ 568, II. 445, ff*.) endeavors to explain the archaic 
forms eBcoKa, e^rjKct,, rJKa. After he seems to have come very 
near the truth, by bringing these forms into connection with 
the Old Slovenic da^u and the other analogous formations 
in this ancient idiom, and with the Lithuanian imperative 
mood in duk, give, dukite, give ye, he suddenly turns off 
again, and says : 

" We can do no better than to regard ehcoKU as a degen- 
erate form of eScoaa; whether the letter s at one leap [sic!] 
became k, or k associated itself with the sibilant of the sub- 
stantive Verb, as in the imperfect form eaKov, eo-«e, in the 



15 

Old Lat. future escit^ and in the imperfect tenses and aorists, 
ending in -eaKov^ -eaKOjjLrjv^ -aafcov, -ao-KOfirfv, as hiveveaice^ fcaX- 
ieaKov, KoXea-KeTO^ eXaaKe^ Baa-d(TK€TO, where we cannot help 
noticing the addition of the substantive verb, which, more- 
over, has been doubled in aa-aKov, aa-crfcofxriv. In eBcoKa, 
e^TfKa, rjKa, however, provided they sounded originally eScocrKa 
etc., the euphonic addition to a simply remained, and thus 
an original eBouaa first became eScoaKa^ and finally, eBtoKa. 
Perhaps the letter k was originally placed before cr in eBoya-a, 
as in ^vv from crvv= Sanscr. sam, so that eScoKa would have 
to be regarded as a reduced form of eSco^a ; even as the form 
xwn must have preceded the Latin cum, in case this is rela- 
ted to ^vv, crvv, samP 

§ 569. " The Lithuanian, also, presents a form related to 
the Greek and Sanscrit [and Old Slavonic?] aorist, in which 
as it seems to me, ic takes the place of an original s ; I mean 
the imperative mood, in which I recognize that Sanscrit 
mood, which agrees with the Greek optative of the aorist, 
and by which k in duk, gi'Ve, dukite, give ye = Sanscr. dasid^- 
VCtMy you may give, (Precat. mid.), becomes related to the tc 
in the Greek eSw/ca (§ 92, p. 144.) " 

In our remarks above we have declared ourselves against 
this generation of k from 5, which Mr. Bopp endeavors to 
vindicate in the above extract. His explanation appears 
very arbitrary, and, at the very outset, conflicts with a cir- 
cumstance which seems to have been disregarded by all 
who have embraced Mr. Bopp's view without further exam- 
ination. The point is this, that these three aorists are inva- 
riably found with the augment, which, as is well known, is 
usually not placed with the suffix gk. This suffix, although 
dating back to an early period, arose, nevertheless, on Pelas- 
gic ground, after the members of the Arian stock had sepa- 
rated ; for it only exists in the Greek and Latin Languages. 
Besides the older form eBroKa, we, in fact, also find Boctkov, 
but without any augment or reduplication whatever, accord- 
ing to the general rule ; even the poets, according to Butt- 
man n (§ 94. Anmerk. 2), employed the augment offered them 
by analogy, only in a very few cases, and only where it 



16 

seemed imperatively demanded hy the metre. According to our 
opinion, these three verbal forms, together with the Lithu- 
anian imperative mood, are rather remnants of the compara- 
tively oldest formation of the verbs,^ with the more recent 
addition of the augment. "EBcoku, 'i^rjKa and rJKa are evi- 
dently instead of eScoKa/ju, e^ijKa/jL and rj/ca/ju, in which the 
letter /i,, as in all other aorists, first became nasalized, that 
is, was pronounced more or less indistinctly, until, finally, it 
was entirely suppressed, both in speaking and writing. 
The forms ScoKa, ^rJKa, ^/ca are instead of Sw/ca/x, '^rJKa/j,, rj/cajju, 
and these, again, are contracted from So-aKUfju, ^i-aKa/jL, e-atcafju^ 
so that we obtain from them the suffix akam^ which corres- 
ponds exactly to the Sanscrit aham^ i. e., a')(am (with a weak 
;)^), and to the Old Slovenic^ a'yam. We believe that this 
particular formation, in the primitive times, as in the Old 
Slovenic, was confined to the first person singular and plural, 
and that, at a later period only, after the independent pro- 
noun of the first person, where it was not suffixed, had 
gradually become changed, and a knowledge of its significa- 
tion, where the pronoun was suffixed, had thus become lost, 
t^he letters k and a of the first person, as in the Lithuanian 
and the Greek, were also extended to the other persons, and 
the final consonant only was used to indicate the other per- 
sons. The same thing, also, w^e notice in the Sans- 
crit, in regard to the vowel a before the final consonant ; 
thus, we find d's-am^ ds4s, as -it, and likewise, d's-am, as -as, 
ds'-at, etc. The fact, that the guttural of the pronoun, 
where it was not suffixed afterw^ards, with some of the 
members of the Arian family became a sibilant, and that 
the vowel a of the last syllable was obscured and became o 
(u) or e, as in the Zend, azem, Old Sloven. asu[m], Gr. agdm, 
agdm, wydv, d'yov, iyov, egon, Lat. egom, ego, does not pre- 
clude the possibility that the various members of this family 
had originally common forms for the several pronouns, of 

1 To which, perhaps, is to be added e5i7S-o/{a besides iSriSc&s. 

2 Mr. Bopp calls this language the Old Slavonic, but Mr. Miklosich (preface, 
p. vii.) calls it the Old Slovenic, because it is merely a part of the Old Slavonic, 
(compare Vergleichende Laut lehre der slavischen Sprachen, vonFr. Miklosich). 



17 

which forms that of the first person was particularly retained, 
as a suffix to the oldest form of the verb, that is the aorist. 
It cannot be decided with certainty, whether the original 
guttural of the first person was a smooth, middle, or aspi- 
rate, since we find all three represented ; but by reasons of 
analogy we assume that the hardest sound is the oldest, 
which is also proved by the Gothic, the oldest Germanic 
idiom of which any traces have been left us. The suffix 
akam. as we have shown above, was originally used entire, 
but in this primitive state w^e find it only in the Greek, in 
the three above-named forms of the aorist, and in the Old 
Slavonic, in that particular tense which, for other reasons, we 
have designated as the primitive one. The original form 
a'^am^ in this primitive tense, gradually assumed several 
forms, all of which, however, may be traced back again to 
this same original form : thus, from a')(am we get ci')(Oin^ ayum^ 
axunij a^u, o^u^, eyu^ iyii^ as in Old Slovenic dayu^ I gave., 
from da-a^u or d^-ayu. ; sus-ayu, I sucked, ber-un, I gather, 
Aor. (ber-a)(if) bra^u; derun, I split, Aor. (der-axun) draxun, 
s^enuri, I drive Aor. gna^xu, I drove. In the aorist of those 
verbs which correspond to the 10th Sanscrit conjugation, the 
pronoun is suffixed to the original root, as is done in those 
verbs where n, t, or d, is inserted, e. g. in riid-as-un, I lament, 
Aor. rud-a')(U for ruda')(um; giib-n-un, I perish, Aor. gilb-O'xii 
(o'xum). The same is the case in other verbs, where other 
letters have been inserted before the pronoun, as in gorjun 
I burn, Aor. gor-e')(u; orjun, I plough, Aor. or-ayu \orayum\, 
Lat. ara-o, Gr. apoco] ; plujufi, I make to flow, Aor. plio-ayu ; 
dejun, I do, Aor. dejayu. When the pronoun is preceded by 
a nasal sound, its initial a is dropped, as in vinun, I wind, 
Aor. vinuu'xu ; but in the iterative form vinjayu there is no 
nasal sound; penjun, I span, Aor. penx^, I spanned. In one 
Slavonic dialect, the Lusatian, the final m or n, together with 
the preceding vowel, is entirely dropped, and the aorist ends 
with the guttural of the pronoun, or the guttural passes 
over into a sibilant, or is dropped altogether, as day, I gave, 
stay, I stood ; bey^ bjey, I was ; nose^j I bore, iterative form 
noshay ; vovam, I cry, vovay, I cried; piy, I drank, from piju, 

2* 



18 

I drink. In the plural, however, the original mis restored, 
as da^, da^Me ; sta^, sta^me ; be^^ be'^me ; tru, Lat. tero, 
i^j^X^ trjexme, trivimus. 

As in the Semitic^ languages, so also in the Indo-Euro- 
pean, the suffixing of the dissyllabic pronoun became incon- 
venient, and they had, therefore, recourse to various means 
in order to facilitate this process. Thus, aham seems to have 
been changed into liaam^ Jidm^ hem^ r)fi^ {r)v) ; by dropping 
the guttural A, was obtained aam^ dm^ rj/uLy rjv ; by shortening 
dm, the syllables dm, ofj,, om ; and the final m, in the Greek 
language, was first nasalized, and imperfectly pronounced, 
and, at last, totally dropped. In the first stage of contrac- 
tion or shortening, we find hdm, hem, rjfjb, where the final m 
afterwards was preserved only in cases where it was sup- 
ported by a following vowel. This form of the pronoun, 
when suffixed to the demonstrative r of the Greek verbal 
adjective, aspirated the dental smooth, and this the preceding 
guttural or labial smooths and middles, while it assibilated 
the preceding dental, as in tvtt-, tutt-t-o?, irvTr-r-afM, or ij/x, 
iTvcl)^7)/jL, iTV(j:>^d /ji, €TV(j>^r}fi-e<; or €v, irv(f)'^djuL-6<; ; hence the in- 
finitive mood TV(j)^rj/ui'6v, Tvcj)^r)ff)iJi-ev-aL Afterwards, how- 
ever, the letter //,, when final, according to the laws of Greek 
phonology, was changed into v; hence we have the future 
TV(p^7][v-€]aoibuaL A second stage of the weakening of the 
pronominal suffix consisted in the dropping of the aspirate, 
so that the long syllable dm or em, dfju or rjfi was appended 
immediately to the original unincreased verbal root, which, 
in this case, taken in its intransitive meaning, assumed the 
function of the passive voice, as x^P' (X^^P)^ ^X^PV^^ ^ '^^^ 
in ^a state of x^P'^i JoVi rejoicing, i-yyp-afjb, ijTJp-av ; crreXX-, 
ia-TaX-rjv, (TTaX'r}[v6]G-oijLac, aTakrjcrofjbai.', pv-{p6), ippvrjv, Iftoived, 
I was in a state of flowing ; TfXrjry, — eTrXijyrjv. In a third 
stage of contraction or weakening, which was entered upon 
at an early period, the syllable dm was shortened in various 

1 E. g. in Vi2|?-i?., e-k'tol, I w II kill, s is shortened of "iat^, ani, I; in Vbjj-a, 
7ii-k'tol, we shall kill, 5 ni stands for '^ihi; in tjV^i^j katal-ta, thou hast killed, 
masc, ta, thou, is contracted from at-ta; in PiVt:j;, thou hast killed, fern. t\ thou, 
fem., is instead of at-at. 



19 

ways. While the letter /t in this tense, in the Lithuanian 
language, passes over into the vowel m, which is related to 
the labial letters through v^ but in the plural reappears ; 
in the Greek it is at first nasalized, afterwards pronounced 
indistinctly, and at last entirely dropped. This particular 
form of the aorist we still find in etnTa for etTra//-, rjveyKa for 
ijveyKafju (from which are derived elTrd/jLijv, '^veyKafirjv), and 
perhaps in eireaa for eirera. In the popular language this 
particular form of the aorist (which we prefer to call the 
strong aorist, because.it is certainly not formed by a compo- 
sition with the substantive verb) seems to have generally 
prevailed, and from this it seems afterwards to have intruded 
into the written language, as elBa, elXa, eka^a^ (conf. Butt- 
mann, AusfUhrl. Grammat, §. 114, p. 278, 279). Instead of 
being dropped, the letter yLt, however, usually changing into v^ 
and av is contracted with the preceding vowel into one syl- 
lable with a long vowel, which, in some verbs, is shortened 
again in the plural ; unless we prefer to regard the v^ the last 
letter of the syllable, as the suffix, representing the personal 
pronoun as, {SiSpaaK, ^P^j) ehpaav^ eSpdv, ehoajju, eSoav, eBcov] 
e^eafi^ e^eav, e^rjv ; h'a/Ji, erjv, rjv ; earaav. earrjv ; eSvafjb, eSvav, 
eBvv ] €<f)vafM, e(f)vav e^w (compare l^va<;, t^^O?, heLKvvaai^ 
huKvvat). Most frequently, however, in the written lan- 
guage of the Greek, the suffix a/^, av^ was weakened into ov. 
In the Old Slavonic, as it seems, it was first nasalized into 
om or «/m, afterwards into on or un^ where the final n was first 
pronounced indistinctly, and at last entirely suppressed ; in 
the plural, however, both in the Lithuanian and the Old 
Slavonic, it was universally pronounced with a preceding 
full o, and only the s of the plural, which has survived only 
in the Sanscrit, the Greek dialects, and the Latin, was worn 
off; as Lith. gawau I got, dual gawowa, ive tiuo got, plur. 
gowome, we got ; Old Slav. dmgu\m\, I moved, dual dvigove, 
ive two moved, plur. dvig-omu[s\, ive 7noved. 

In regarding the ending am (an, on = av, ov) as a con- 
stituent part of the suffixed pronoun of the first person, we 
only follow the example of the Indian grammarians them- 
selves, who lived some thousands of years nearer to the 



^0 

origin of these verbal formations than Mr. Bopp and our- 
selves, and who may be imagined to have still had a sort 
of consciousness of the mode in which the forms in their 
language were generated, which consciousness has been 
lost by us. In fact, Mr. Bopp himself (§ 500) declares, that 
he must attribute a pronominal origin to what are usually 
termed " the copulative vowels e and o " in verbs, such as 
(j)ep-o-/jL6v (which we rather divide thus, (j)ep-o/jL-€v, cjiep-e-re) ; 
but we cannot agree with him in his further deductions, and 
rather side with the Indian grammarians, who regard the 
vowel a in the ending am (om, on) as a part of the pronoun. 
Even Mr. Bopp himself, in a note to § 437, p. 268, remarks : 
" Although we have divided above db'-ar-a-m^ just as we 
did €^ep-o-v, yet, we must observe, that, according to the 
Indian grammarians, the full ending of the first person sin- 
gular of the secondary forms [we rather call them primary, 
because they were first in use] is not m, but am. The end- 
ing am, indeed, is also found in verbs where the letter a 
cannot be regarded as the characteristic vowel of the class 
to which the verb belongs ; as from i, to go, we do not form 
di-m, I iventf but dp'-am, and the Sanscrit dstrnav-am, plur. 
dstrnuma, is found together with the Greek iaropvvv, iarop- 
vvp^ev. But, inasmuch as the second person singular is 
expressed in the Sanscrit by the letter s only, and the third 
by U and as, for instance, the Sanscrit dstr-no-s, astr-no-t 
corresponds to the Greek icrTopvv[<;], eaTopviJ[T], we may con- 
clude from this, as well as from the fact that in the Greek, 
also, the first person is simply expressed by v, that the letter 
a in dstrnavam is an inorganical admixture from the first 
principal conjugation, even as in Greek iaropwov would 
correspond to ia-Topvu-v^ Instead of having recourse in 
Sanscrit to an inorganical formation, we prefer to look 
upon this formation as organic, by showing that iaropvvv is, 
indeed, a contraction of a/ju, av, and that o in ov has been 
weakened from this, and that the contraction of va into v 
is not of such rare occurrence in Greek ; as we have seen 
above, as 6o-^va<;, 6or^v<; ; airoKXvao-iv, airoXXva-iv ; 6(j)pv<i from 
6<})pva<;, the eyebrows. 



21 

From these considerations, we think, it is made clear that 
Mr. Bopp is wrong in regarding the suffix am as a blunted 
secondary formation of ami, a/xt ; for it is much rather a 
primary formation, existing before the present tense, which 
tense, from reasons of common sense only, must be regarded 
as of a later origin, since it does not express a completed 
fact, but one which is in the process of completion, and 
inasmuch, as, in the Slavonic language, it is absolutely used 
in the place of the future. — Conf. Prof. Bopp's Verbalism^ 
III. p. 98. 

On page 259, § 431, Mr. Bopp, says: " The double form of 
the personal endings is shown in the Latin also by the cir- 
cumstance that wherever there was originally the fuller 
ending mf, this was entirely dropped, with the single excep- 
tion of su7n and inquam ; while the original final m has been 
preserved throughout ; thus, we find amo, amabo, but amabam^ 
eram, sim, amem, as in the Sanscrit d-b^avam and d'sam, I 
was, sj/dm, I may be, kdmdyeyarti, I may love.^'' We must 
emphatically declare ourselves against this statement of Mr. 
Bopp, which, starting with him, has been adopted by all 
grammarians, that, namely, in Latin, with the single excep- 
tion of sum and inqiiam, the suffix of the first person has 
been dropped. We are, on the contrary, of the opinion, 

1, that the ending mi which Mr. Bopp most probably 
regards as a shortened form of ma, and which latter form we 
moreover hold to be a metathesis of am, om, em, im, never 
existed in this language, and, as a general thing, was 
developed only in the Sanscrit and the Zend, after they had 
separated from the other members of the Arian family; 

2, that not the entire suffix, but only the final m of the suf- 
fix om, had become lost, after it had first become nasalized, 
and had gradually been pronounced more and more indis- 
tinctly. This suffix was originally a7n, as in inqiiam (inqua- 
am), and it lost the letter m about the same time, as the 
unsuffixed pronoun ego, which originally sounded aham, 
a%ftm, akam, agam, egam, egom. If Mr. Bopp's supposition 
were right, and if the letter o of the first person were 
nothing else than a copulative letter, it would seem inexpli- 



22 

cable to us how this copulative letter should have remained 
stereotyped, as it were, in the first person singular and 
plural, in four members of the Indo-European family, the 
Latin, Greek, Lithuanian and Slavonic, and should therein 
manifest a marked difference from the other persons of the 
verb. The history of the formations of the verb proves 
clearly that this letter o is the last remnant of the pronomi- 
nal suffix of the first person. The plural alone of the Greek 
Xe'y-ofiev^ Xe7-o//-69, (leg-omen, leg-omes), the Latin volumus 
for volomos, quaesumus for quaesomos, &c., and the Slavonic 
and Lithuanian forms neso^u^ plur. neso')(omu\s\^ we bore; 
raud-aju^ plur. raud-ojome[s\^ shows that this letter has been 
weakened from the nasalized om, on^ um, un, and that the 
letter m was originally pronounced full, — and we need no 
other evidence. It is not our intention to call the Messrs. 
E-itschl and Fleckeisen to account for rejecting the forms 
dicom, faciom, incipissom, subigitom^ videom, which occur in 
some of the manuscripts of Plautus, because, as they say, 
none of the old. grammarians seem acquainted with any 
such forms in the singular. At all events these forms are 
not mere errors in writing, since we cannot conceive how 
the copyist, by a mere mistake, should have, in more places 
than one, written down these endings, unless he had still 
some sort of indistinct recollection of them, or was made 
familiar with them by written traditions and documents 
which are now lost to us. It by no means appears strange, 
that, while the letter m disappeared in the present tense, it 
should still have continued in era77i, amabam, monebam^ lege- 
bam^ nequibam^ ibam; for, inasmuch as the letter <2, in these 
endings, was not weakened into o, its connection with the 
personal pronoun ego^ in its later form, was completely lost 
sight of by the people : while, in the present tense, where 
this connection still remained visible, the form of the suffix 
was accommodated to that of ego in its more modern garb. 
The Lithuanian, however, proves that u or o, uni or om^ 
were originally am; for, while, in the singular, a was ob- 
scured into M, and the letter m dropped, in the plural the 
vowel a is still preserved, and the letter m retained, because 



23 

followed by a vowel ; as, sing, weiu^ plur. vjezame^ we carry. 
The same thing we find in the Gothic present tense, where 
the letter m has been preserved in the first person plural, 
because a whole syllable had been dropped after it, while, 
in the singular, this same letter m of the suffix aw, was 
first nasalized, and afterwards given up entirely; just as in 
the Greek, where the letter /a was dropped in the singular 
of the active voice, as in hir^a, while it was retained in 
the plural and in the middle, or else was partly changed 
into V ] as in irvyfrafMev, eTvyjrdfia/jL, iTvyjrd/jLav, irvyfrd/jLrjv ; 
i(j)^dp-afjb, icj)'^dp-av^ or a = t;, e(f)^dp-riv. A similar change 
of the letter a of the suffix am^ which sounded like a in far, 
into the long English a in fate, we notice in the Armenian 
and Albanian ; and the addition of the suffix am or em to 
the vowel of the root, with which it coalesced into one long 
vowel, we find to some extent in the Gothic and Old-Saxon 
among the Germanic tongues, and likewise in the Persian, 
Armenian, and Albanian. 

Mr. Bopp says (§ 434, p. 261) : " At all events the ending 
/jbao of the middle and passive voices, which [in Greek] is 
common to all classes of verbs, shows that they all had orig- 
inally the ending /xt in the active voice. As regards the 
general preservation of the character of the first person in 
all forms of the middle and passive voices, the Greek has 
an immense advantage over its Asiatic sisters, which in the 
singular of the middle, both in the primary and the second- 
ary forms have lost the m. In the same manner, therefore, 
in which from the Sanscrit b^dr-dmi, we, as it were, restore the 
Greek (jiepco, so also from the Greek (l)epo/jLac, we trace back 
the blunted Sanscrit form b'dre to its original form b^dr-a- 
me or b'-dr-a-meP Even if we grant that the two members 
of the Arian family, the Sanscrit and the Zend, had this 
complete ending in the middle voice, after the ending of the 
first person singular in the active voice, but that, in the 
course of time am had become mi, we need not, on this 
account, assume the same of the Greek. On the contrary, 
in the Greek, as well as in the Lithuanian and the Slavonic, 
the suffix was shortened into mi only in a small number of 



24 

verbs. The ending fiau^ in Greek, may be explained in two 
ways ; either the letter m of the first person in the active 
voice, by imitation of the second and third persons aau and 
rat, which were themselves expanded from cri and rt, was 
formed into ixai] or else, since the passive voice is by no 
means one of the oldest formations, the passive ending of 
the first person singular of all verbs, by imitation of the 
ending of the first and second persons, was formed from the 
shortened suffix yu,6, which had already been introduced in a 
small number of verbs. In the Sanscrit and Zend this short- 
ened form did not become general until after their separation 
from the rest of the members of the Arian family, and in the 
Greek, Lithuanian, and Slavonic, it was confined to a small 
number of verbs, while in the Latin, Gothic, High German, 
Old Saxon, Persian, Albanian, and Armenian, not a single 
trace of this secondary form of the active voice, and still less 
of that of the passive voice, can be found. It can be proved, 
however, that all these languages in the beginning in the 
first person of the present tense had the ending am, um^ em, 
(im) ; and their present tenses, therefore, appear formed of a 
portion of that suffix, which we claim to have been common 
to all. 

We agree perfectly with Mr. Bopp in § 477, pp. 324, 325, 
where he explains the Latin r of the passive voice by the 
reflexive s ; for this r is certainly identical with 5, and also, in 
the remaining idioms of the Arian family it serves to express 
the passive voice. In the neighboring Semitic family, even 
in the Hebrew (Niphal conj. Chaldee, Syriac, Arabic, Ethi- 
opic, the reflexive relation is the bridge by which we pass 
over into the passive voice .i We have to repeat, however, 
our objections to Mr. Bopp's explanation of the second per- 

1 In case it is true, and we are very much inclined to believe it, that the Indo- 
European languages, together with the Semitic, originally formed one primitive 
language, the fact that all the Semitic, and a part of the Indo-European lan- 
guages, use the same letters, in all persons, to represent the reflexive relation, 
would go very far towards proving the priority of this mode of expressing the 
reflexive relation to that mode by which the reflexive form is strengthened, in 
the several persons, by the distinctive words for each person ; for this latter form 
evidently belongs to a later stage of development. 



25 

son plural, which we have raised in our work already 
referred to.i In order to leave the mind of the reader unbi- 
assed, we extract from Mr. Bopp's work the article in ques- 
tion : 

'' It is easy to see that the second person plural bears no 
relation whatever to the remaining persons of the passive 
voice ; but it is entirely owing to the circumstance that the 
former cultivators of grammar did not trouble themselves at 
all about the rationale of linguistic phenomena, and, that the 
relationship which exists between the Latin and Greek lan- 
guages was not studied in a truly scientific and systematic 
manner, that the form amamini so long occupied its place 
among the paradigms, without anybody's asking whence it 
came and how it originated ? I think I was the first to raise 
this question in my Conjugation si/stem (Frankfort a. M., 
1816, p. 105, fF), and I repeat here confidently the explana- 
tion which I there made, that amamini is a participle of the 
passive voice in the masculine nominative plural ; thus, that 
amamini stands for amamini estis, as in the Greek rerv/i/jbevoi 
ela-L The Latin suffix is minus, which corresponds to the 
Greek /xei^o? and the Sanscrit mdna-s. But inasmuch as 
these participles, as such, passed entirely out of use in the 
Latin, and only remained in the second person plural, in a 
state of petrifaction, as it were, they assumed in common 
language the character of a personal form, and as their 
nature of a noun was no longer recognized, the distinction 
of the genders, also, was no longer observed in them, and 
the addition of estis was discontinued. It may be proper to 
allude here to a similar process in Sanscrit. In this lan- 
guage, data (from the root ddtdr-),{or instance, properly sig- 
nifying daturus, is used in the sense of daturus est, without 
taking into consideration the genders ; it is thus likewise used 
for datura and daturum est, although this form, which is also 
equivalent to the Latin nomen agentis in tor, is provided 
with the feminine ending in tri (Lat. tri-c- § 119), and a 
female who gives is in Sanscrit just as little called ddtd as 

^ " Latin Pronunciation and the Latin Alphabet." 
3 



26 

dator in Latin. In the plural, moreover, ddtdras, when used 
as a noun, signifies givers, but when used as a verb, thei/ will 
give, in all genders ; the same is the case with the plural 
form ddtdrdu. The Sanscrit use of this form is still more 
remarkable than the Latin, because, in the former language 
ddtd, ddtdrdu, ddtdras are still used as substantives. It is, 
then, entirely owing to the circumstance of the language, 
in its existing state, being no longer able to dispose of these 
forms in the sense of future participles, that in ddtd, ddtdrdu, 
ddtdras, where they signify dabit, dabunt, the consciousness 
of their adjective nature and their power of expressing the 
different genders was lost, and that the character of common 
verbal persons was assumed by them." 

In order to be impartial, we must, moreover, state what 
Mr. Bopp adduces in favor of the existence of these parti- 
ciples in Latin. On pp. 326, 327 he continues :" But to 
return to amamini, the reviewer of my Conjugation system 
in the Jenaer Litter aturzeitung (G. F. Grotefend, if I am 
not mistaken) supports this explanation by the forms alu7]i- 
nus, Vertumnus, which evidently belong to this particular 
formation of the participle, but in which the letter i has been 
lost. This letter was preserved in terminus, which Mr. Lisch 
very properly, as it seems to me, explains, that which has 
been crossed, from the Sanscrit tar. Fe-mina, she who bears, 
consequently in the middle voice [conf. oi yecvafjiepoL, parents, 
in Herodotus], which is likewise adduced by Mr. Lisch, I had 
previously regarded as a kindred formation; its root isfe, 
from which are also denveA fetus, fetura, fecundus. In addi- 
tion to these, gemini (those w^ho have been born at the same 
timek, from the root gen), which is in the place of genmini, 
genimini, may be taken into consideration [we object to this; 
for by this explanation there would be wanting in this word 
two essential points which are inherent in the idea " twins,^^ 
viz. that of duality, and that of being born at the same 
time]." 

This theory of Mr. Bopp, endorsed by learned men, such 
as Grotefend, was received in the grammars without scarcely 
meeting with any resistance whatever. But as regards Mr. 



2T 

Bopp's assertion that the proceeding in the Sanscrit lan- 
guage is much more remarkable, than that advocated by 
himself, we, and very probably many of our readers, cannot 
agree with him ; for in the Sanscrit, we only need to supply 
est and sunt but in the Latin, according to Mr. Bopp's idea, 
estis^ sills (eratis, essetis), este, or estate and, moreover, five 
participles for various tenses and moods in which no parti- 
ciple has ever existed in any language ; thus leg-iminu-s, 
leg-imini estis; leg-aminu-s, leg-amini sitis ; Leg-ehaminu-s^ 
leg-ebamini estis ; leg-ereminu-s leg-eremini sitis ; leg-iminu-s 
legimini este, estate^ which is a linguistic absurdity. 

As, for the reasons here given, we cannot embrace Mr. 
Bopp's theory, we must endeavor to supply a better one, 
and for this purpose, as is done by Mr. Bopp himself, we 
undertake to ascend into the ante-historical ages, and to 
vindicate, if possible, to this form also a reflexive character. 
As we look upon the imperative mood as the oldest form 
next to the aorist, and are, confirmed in this belief by the 
consideration that the form most immediately required by 
language, after it had given birth to the aorist, which 
expressed a fact, act, or phenomenon completed, was that by 
which the repetition of such an act or fact was demanded, so 
also in the present case we start with the imperative mood. 
The oldest form of this mood in the passive voice was imi- 
no)', which originally consisted of i7nin and os or or. It is 
true that the genuineness of this ending has been disputed 
lately ; but we have seen in the case of the ending ovi of 
the first person singular, how very ready even our best schol- 
ars are to throw anything away, on the plea of its being a 
slip of the pen, that does not agree with their own ideas. 
It is a w^ell-known principle in hermeneutics, in case we 
have to choose between two readings, to select the more 
difficult or rarer as the genuine one ; for the copyist may, 
indeed, be supposed to have changed a more difficult or 
rarer reading into an easier one, but not vice versa. The 
original 05 or or, like s in general, was gradually pronounced 
more and more indistinctly, until at last it vanished alto- 
gether, when the consciousness of its origin and its meaning 



28 

had become lost among the people ; indeed, on account of its 
ending in o, it was then even wrongly employed in the singu- 
lar, while in the plural it was changed into i. According to 
our view the ending iminos or iminor is the original complete 
form, composed of imin and os. Imin is the Sanscrit accu- 
sative yusman; the letter 5, in this word was early assimi- 
lated in the Greek to the following //., and the consonantal 
y either passed over into the aspirate, or it vanished altogether 
v/iifi6<;, ace. vfi/jLa^i for v/jL/jiav[^] ; in Latin, where this pronoun 
was used as a suffix, y disappeared entirely and the letter fjb 
was not doubled, of which we find analogous cases in other 
old Latin words ; a^ in the syllable an^ was changed into z, be- 
cause it was not sustained by the accent, and it gave up the 
letter n to the following syllable 05, commencing with a vow- 
el; u^ in the penult was weakened in the Greek into f, and in 
the Latin into i; the connecting vowel o is the same as u in 
legit-u-r, and e in the Umbrian, but 5 or r is the genuine 
reflexive sign. This letter, however, either disappeared in 
the way above-mentioned, and o was weakened into ^, or it 
went through the same changes as the genitive singular and 
the nominative plural of the o declension; that is, it first 
became oi, afterwards oe, and finally, i, (compare our work 
on Latin pronunciation, p. 115). The ending iminor corres- 
ponds exactly to the Greek v/jLa<; avrov^, and it is the only 
relic of the strengthened reflexive form in the Latin. 

Mr. Bopp says, (§ 515) : " If the question is raised, whether 
the Sanscrit from ancient times has made use of its three 
past tenses without any syntactical distinction whatever, and 
whether it uselessly expended its creative powers in their 
production ; or whether, in the course of time, the more 
refined distinctions of their significations were lost sight of 
in popular usage, it seems to me, it ought to be decided in 
favor of the latter ; for even, as the forms in language were 
gradually worn away and blunted, so also their significa- 
tions were subject to a wearing away and blunting." 

In this remark there are two points in which we are at 
issue with Mr. Bopp. First, he seems to suppose that the 
different forms for the expression of the past tense arose 



29 

simultaneously ; secondly^ that these three forms originally 
represented various modifications or shades of the past tense, 
which, in the course of time, were lost by a sort of process 
of degeneracy or wearing away, and that this is proved by 
the indiscriminate use made of these forms in the Sanscrit 
writings which we now possess. We are, on the contrary, 
of the opinion that these three forms arose at different times, 
and that each new form, at its rise, did not completely crowd 
out the former one, as may be seen in the case of the so- 
called first and second aorists in Greek. In this language, 
moreover, the strong or old aorist still partly coincided in its 
form, or at least in its use, with the imperfect tense ; for we 
find the imperfect tense eXeyov of Xiyo)^ e(f>r)v of (prjfjLL, and 
also i^oa, ave^oa of fiodo), dvafiodco and yeiv of el/jbt more fre- 
quently used in the sense of the aorist, than of the imperfect 
tense. The so-called second perfect was certainly nothing 
else originally than another form of the strong or old aorist, 
and at one time was employed in the place of the aorist, 
and at another or later time in that of the perfect tense. 
According to our opinion, the act of fixing the different 
shades in the meaning of the past tenses supposes a state 
of mental majority, which can only exist in the manhood, 
and not in the childhood, of a nation ; but it is not by any 
means necessary that each people should have reached the 
culminating point of mental cultivation in every direction. 
So the Latin remained behind the Greek in the development 
of the verb, inasmuch as it has no separate forms for the 
aorist and the perfect tense, and although it has one more 
case in the declension of the nouns than the latter, it still 
expresses coming' from and being' in a place by the same 
form ; as venit Carthagine ; vixit Carthagine. It is, there- 
fore, not at all improbable that the Sanscrit should have 
remained behind both these languages, and should never 
have arrived at the same degree of logical precision ; especi- 
ally since it is an established fact that it has never succeeded 
in developing the pluperfect tense. 

Mr. Bopp says further, (§ 516, p. 389) : " It may be said 
that language, in the aorist, rids itself of the giina and 

3* 



30 

other characteristics of class for this reason only, because, 
in its anxiety to report facts, it has no time to pronounce 
them ; as in the Sanscrit, in the second person of the im- 
perative mood, on account of the hurry in which a com- 
mand is given, the lighter verbal form is employed, and we 
thus find in the second person vid-d'i, know thou, yoongdl, 
unite thou, while in the third person we have vet'-tu, let him 
know, yoondktu, let him unite. This species of aorist, which 
has just been mentioned, is, however, comparatively rare 
both in Sanscrit and in Greek, and the giving up of the 
characteristics of class in both languages is not confined to 
the aorist ; besides, more letters are usually found in the 
aorist than in the imperfect tense ; compare, for instance, 
ddicsam^ ehet^a with the imperfect i^n^e, ddis' am, which is 
exactly like the above-mentioned aorist. The sibilant of 
the first aorist, also, cannot be regarded, in my view, as that 
particular element of sound to which this tense owes its 
peculiar signification, since this letter occurs likewise in 
several other forms, the meaning of which is in no wise 
connected with that of the aorist." As regards the first 
statement of Mr. Bopp, to which he himself does not seem 
to attach much weight, he cannot expect us to agree with 
him, since there is certainly no necessity at all why people, 
in their anxiety to report a fact, should not have had the 
time, or should not have taken the time, to pronounce a long 
vowel or a diphthong instead of a short vowel. With 
respect to the length or shortness of the original roots this 
is a subject which, at the present day, can no longer be 
decided with any certainty. However, this much it seems 
to us may be established beyond any doubt : that the roots 
were^ originally monosyllabic ; therefore, any form which 
consists of more than one syllable may be at once put 
down as a later formation. Thus, on comparing ddadam or 
ihlhwv with dddm or eh(ov, the latter would naturally have to 
be regarded as the older form ; so that there is no reason 
why we should suppose with Mr. Bopp (p. 389), that, in 
the formation of the second aorist, the guna and other char- 
acteristics of class were dropped, if they had not even 



31 

existed at that time. As regards the fact that in Sanscrit 
db'aram^ and in Greek eXejov, together with adadam and £7/7- 
vwaKov and ekd/jL^avov are designated as imperfect tenses, 
this only proves the arbitrary mode of proceeding of the 
grammarians, since it is very plain that the two former 
words belong to an earlier stage of development of the 
language, while the longer forms were produced subse- 
quently. In those cases where the monosyllabic root had a 
long vowel or a diphthong, we find it quite natural that the 
long vowel of the original root, when another syllable was 
prefixed to it (for instance, when the first two letters of the 
root were reduplicated), should have been weakened and 
shortened, since in this case it was deprived of the accent. 
This weakening, however, did not always take place, but 
sometimes the accent was simply shifted to the prefix, as 
may be seen from the following examples, where we regard 
the so-called second perfects as originally identical with the 
strong (second) aorist: as, X^J^e (the original form then), 
XeXrf^e, XeXa^e, eXa^e, Xa^e. On the other hand the follow- 
ing forms were used simultaneously: rjpapov, dpdpa^ dprjpa, 
(l)6vy€, 7ri(f)€Dy6, Tret^irye, iipvye, which forms were subsequently 
employed to express various shades of the past.^ Com- 
pare also the Doric Xa/c-eo), Ionic XrjK-eco, the Attic sibilated 
Xd(TKco, XeXcLKa for XeXaKUfju, aorist eXaKov. The long syllable 
occurs even in the aorist, e. g. in TreTrXrjyov {eirXyyov, TrXrjyov), 
A similar weakening of the vowels, as is well known, has 
taken place in the Latin, where a passed over into e and ^, 
e. g. cap-, cap-it, con'cip-it, con'cep-tum, which subsequently 
became con-cep turn, fall-it, fe fell-it; the cause of this weak- 
ening was that the accent was first placed on the prefix, 
and afterwards settled down upon the root. 

Mr. Bopp first advanced in his Conjugation system the 



1 In the forms eSrjS-o/ca and 01773-0x0 for ayf}y-oxa, which are found together 
with 45r}dcas and ^7070;/, we recognize remnants of the same original suffix, 
which we have found in eSwKa {e56-aKa), e^Ka (e^e-aKra), ^Ka (e-aKa), viz. d/fo, 
dfca/x ; in the above words this suffix passed over into oKa/x, as in the Old Sla- 
vonic, instead of the later form €70^14, iyou, iyd^, must be regarded as the first 
weakening of a, and e as the second. 



32 

idea, which he repeats in the present work, § 526 — 528, pp. 
404 — 406, and which seems to us perfectly correct, that the 
Latin, in addition to the root as (es), which was employed 
also by other members of the Arian family in the formation 
of their tenses, also made use of the Sanscrit verb bhu, (f)v, 
fUy wherein it was followed by the Irish dialect of the Gaelic 
idiom ; as, mealfa-m, meal-fa- (which we would rather 
divide thus : meal-f-am, for meal-fi-am), or mealfa-maid, or 
mealfa-maoid, ive shall deceive, meal-faidhe, you will deceive, 
meal-faid, they vnll deceive, meal-fai-r, thou wilt deceive, meal- 
fai-dh, he will deceive. The circumstance that the Latin bam 
expresses the past, but the Irish fam the future, Mr. Bopp 
continues, ought not to prevent our regarding these two 
forms as identical in their origin. We are troubled much 
less by this circumstance than Mr. Bopp himself, since we 
regard not merely the letter m, but also am as the suffix of 
the first person singular and plural. The proper form of the 
Irish suffix ought to he fiam or biam, since in its isolated 
position biad\me signifies / shall be (literally it ivill be me), 
biadmaoid, ive shall be, where the character of the third per- 
son singular has amalgamated with the root. The ex- 
ponent of the future relation in these forms, Mr. Bopp goes 
on to say, is the vowel i, with which may be compared the 
Latin i in amabis, amabit, and also in eris, erit, etc. We 
object to this view, for we think that the future relation is 
expressed by the root bhu, <i>v,fu itself, which not only signi- 
fies the state of having' become, TrecfyvKevat, or of being, but 
also the act of becoming, fio, </>ua). This idea of becoming is 
contained both in the imperfect tense and in the future ; for 
the very name of the imperfect tense implies that it de- 
scribes an imperfect action, or one w^hich is in progress, or is 
becoming, that is, one which is not yet completed when 
another action takes place. The idea of the past, however, 
which is not contained in that of becoming, was furnished 
to the imperfect tense by the predicate of the primary 
clause, and in case the imperfect tense was employed in the 
primary clause itself, this idea could be supplied to it from 
the context, as is done with the present itself in a clause 



33 

introduced by the conjunction dum, when concomitant to 
the predicate in a past tense. The application of the word 
becoming' m the formation of these two tenses is very ap- 
propriate, as all existence is a continual becoming, or a con- 
tinual repetition of the same act. In the Latin, also, we 
find the ending esco^ which signifies to become, employed 
in the formation of the future ; as superescit for supererit, in 
Ennius. According to our view, ero did not originally have 
an exclusive signification of the future, as little as the Greek 
eero/juai, eSofiac, Tr/o/^at, but it is an original form of the present 
tense, esom, so?n, sum^ where the letter m was at first pro- 
nounced indistinctly, and at last was dropped entirely, 
while 5, between two vowels, became r. The fact that 
the future, which originally was expressed by the present 
tense, gave rise to the idea of becoming-, or coming into a 
state of existence, is proved by the later German, where 
the future ich werde gehen means literally I am becoming to 
go, or, I am coming into a state of going. This idea of be- 
coming, in German, was even transferred to the present and 
imperfect tenses of the passive voice, where ich luercle, or ich 
wurde gelehrt signifies / am becoming, or I ivas becoming 
taught ; ich bin, ich war gelehrt worden, I have become, I had 
become tavght. 

Mr. Bopp (§ 527) justly regards as strange the long e in 
ebam of the third and fourth conjugations, leg-ebam and 
i-ebam, and together with Ag. Benary he explained it form- 
erly (in the Berliner Jahrbucher for 1838, p. 13) as an amal- 
gamation of the class-vowel with the augment. Without 
entirely abandoning his former view, he seems now more 
inclined to the opinion that the only purpose for which the 
class-vowel was lengthened in these forms was to enable it 
to bear the burden of the suffixed substantive verb, and thus 
to give more strength to the theme of the principal verb. 

We do not think that the assumption of an augment in 
order to explain the long e of the imperfect tense can at all 
be justified, since there is not a single instance on record 
where the reduplication in Latin was weakened into an 
augment; we very readily admit, however, that the imper- 



34 

feet and future tenses of the third and fourth conjugations, 
in their formation, may have conformed in an inorganic 
manner with these tenses in the second conjugation. In 
the third conjugation this is chiefly limited to the imperfect 
tense, but in the fourth conjugation we often meet with the 
ending 60, instead of am; as scibo^ aperibor^ instead of 
sciam, aperiar. The vowel i, in the fourth conjugation, was 
originally long; for, like a, in the first conjugation (and 
sometimes even e in the second), it arose from the diph- 
thong ay^ which signifies a making. This suffix ay was not 
only contracted into a long a [a in father) in the first conju- 
gation, and into a long e (ey in tliey) in the second conjuga- 
tion, but, through the mediation of the diphthong el (ei in 
height)^ into which ai or ay had been obscured, it likewise 
passed over into a long % {i in machine). This long z, when 
followed by a vowel, became short, as in audio., but when 
followed by a consonant, it preserved its long character, as 
in scibo., where the ending bo was appended immediately to 
the stem or suffix i, and also in a few imperfect tenses, as in 
vestibam.) largibar, for vestiebam, largiebar, unless we prefer to 
regard scibo as a contraction of sclebo, and vestibam of ves- 
tlebam; in the majority of cases, however, in the formation 
of the imperfect tense of the fourth conjugation the analogy 
of the third conjugation was followed where the vowel e in 
ebam had been lengthened in an inorganic manner, by anal- 
ogy with the imperfect tense of the second conjugation. 

For those who are not satisfied with this explanation, we 
have still a third one to offer of our own. The long e be- 
fore bam is neither an augment which coalesced with the 
final vowel of the stem into a long e", nor is it an inorganic 
imitation of the second conjugation, but it arose from the 
diphthong el^ the vowel I of which had been developed 
from s before the labial b (as before the labial m in elfxl) ; 
so that the diphthong el takes the place of the substantive 
verb es, to be., or being. Amabam, consequently, arose in the 
following manner : am-ay-es-bam, a7nd-esbam., amd-esbafu, 
amd-eibam, amd-ebam, amdbam, and, when translated hter- 
ally, it signifies : bam, 1 was becoming; es, one being; ay., 



35 

makings am, love: mone-esham., mone-eiham, mone-ebam, 
monebam, I was becoming" one being reminding; leg-esbam, 
leg-eibain, leg-ebam, I was becoming one who was reading; 
audi-ebam, I was becoming one who was hearing; ama-esbo, 
ama-eibo, ama-ebo, amdbo, I am becoming one being loving. 
The letter s in other places also passed over into i (cf. our 
work on Latin Pronunciation, p. 80), as in the Greek, be- 
fore the labial fi, el/jbi, elfjuev for eV/xt, icr/jbiv. The combina- 
tion of two auxiliaries, as in es-bam, we also find in the 
third person plural of the perfect tenses ending in si, as 
clau[d]-s-erunt, where s is universally admitted to be the 
substantive verb, and erunt for esunt is a surviving form of the 
original present tense; and, in case Mr. Bopp is right, which 
we do not think, fuvi inste-a.d of fufu-vi,fufui,fiivi,fui, is 3, 
compound of itself as a verb, and itself as a suffix. No 
doubt the suffix of the perfect subjunctive is also a double 
composition of the substantive verb, scrip-s-erim for scrip-s- 
esim, or scrip-si-rim or sim, just as ausim is instead of auds- 
sim. We do not hesitate to regard the future bo as having 
descended from bom, bam, and thus consider it as originally 
identical with the suffix of the imperfect tense. It is our 
opinion that the formation of the imperfect tense is older 
than that of the future, since the function of the future 
tense was originally also performed by the present tense, 
and on account of the close connection between these two 
tenses, the ending am of the future tense was changed into 
om, o, as in the present tense, both of which followed in this 
particular the later form egom, ego. 

Mr. Bopp (§§556—558, pp. 485—437), tracing the perfect 
ending vi (ui) to the substantive verb /wo, can indeed sup- 
port his theory by the formation of the imperfect and future 
tenses, which is admitted by us ; still, by so doing he merely 
establishes the possibility of such a formation, but nothing 
more. Several objections have been raised against this 
theory. First of all it has been justly observed by the 
opponents of this view that, whether we derive the suffix v 
or u from the letters / or w of the root fuo, (pvco, this verb 
cannot be pretended to express an accomplished fact or 



36 

state; moreover, in the above two tenses, though they are 
compounded of the Sanscrit bhu or Latin fuo^ this verb 
rather expresses becoming than being. The oldest form of 
this perfect tense, also, is not/m, hwifuvi^ and thus it ap- 
pears provided with the very same suffix which Mr. Bopp 
endeavors to explain by means of itself. We are, therefore, 
compelled by these considerations to endeavor to find an- 
other explanation of this form. 

In eight members of the Arian family there are more or 
less traces of a form of the perfect tense, which, with the 
help of Mr. Bopp, we shall endeavor to examine more 
closely. In the Sanscrit there is still preserved in the parti- 
ciple of the reduplicated perfect tense a certain suffix which 
expresses a being endowed or furnished with something. 
This suffix appears in three degrees as regards strength, 
vans^ vat, us^ {= oosh), and of us' or oosh, which is the weakest 
of all, is formed the feminine us'i (= ooshee). The shortest 
form oosh, according to Mr. Bopp (§ 788) is found in a 
single instance in the Gothic tongue/mberusjos, the parents; 
in all other instances this form of the participle has been 
lost in this language (we should like to compare with this 
form the expression ol yeivd/Luevot in Herodotus, instead of 
ol yovet^). lo the Old Prussian, also, some forms are found 
which appear connected with this original perfect form (cf. 
Bopp, § 787) ; as murrawuns, having murmured, klantiwuns, 
having cursed. The vowel u in wuns, just as in the ordinary 
form uns, and also the vowels o and a in ons and ans, which 
latter vowel, when after a consonant, is equivalent to e in 
the Lithuanian ens, have become, according to Mr. Bopp, 
weakened of a, which was originally d. This participle is 
generally used in the Old Prussian as a circumlocution of 
the perfect indicative ; as, asmai murrawuns bhe klantiwuns, 
ye have murmured and cursed. The future, also, which is 
wanting in the Old Prussian, is always expressed by the 
auxiliary to become, and the participle of the perfect tense ; 
as, madliti, tyt ivirstai ious immusis (where the vowel u of the 
plural form usis is organic, and identical with the Sanscrit 
u of that stem which is used in the weakest cases, and also 



37 

ill the feminine us^ it is also identical with the letter u in 
the corresponding Lithuanian forms), laukiti iyt wirstai ions 
aupallusis^ pray^ then you ivill take (literally, then you become 
having taken), seek, then you ivillfind (stnci\y, having found). 
The weakest form of the Sanscrit suffix of the participle 
likewise appears in the Lithuanian in the oblique cases of 
the masculine, yet with the inorganic addition of ia. The 
nominative case, siikens, as regards its termination, is based 
upon the strong Sanscrit theme vdhs; the letter s in sukens 
remains in the nominative and vocative cases, while in the 
Sanscrit, in both these cases, the sign of the nominative 
case, as well as the final consonant, is dropped, for it does 
not tolerate two consonants at the end of a word ; as rurud- 
van for rurudvdns, in the vocative case rftrudvah. In the 
Zend, according to Mr. Bopp, § 787, the letter s of the nom- 
inative case is changed into o, as dad^vdo, having created, vid- 
vdo, knoiving (elSm). In the weakened cases, as well as 
before the feminine character i, like the Sanscrit suffix it 
is contracted into us'. 

With the form vat, of which, in the Sanscrit, are formed 
the middle cases of the perfect participle, as has been cor- 
rectly stated by Mr. Bopp, § 789, the Greek or is connected, 
in which the primitive accentuation has been preserved, but 
the digamma given up, which, as a general thing, is rejected 
in the middle of words, especially in the suffix evr, which 
corresponds to the Sanscrit vant of the strong cases. As, 
therefore, a^nrekoevr compares with the Sanscrit forms, such 
as d'ana-vant, endowed ivith riches, so also reTV(^(F)oT com- 
pares wuth tetupvat (we would rather say TervirFor), with 
which latter form, moreover, agrees the neuter form rervcjio^ 
in the nominative, accusative, and vocative cases. The 
feminine form in via, which is a mutilated form of vaia 
(oo-la, ocr[7/] a), corresponds with the Sanscrit tutupu'sH. We 
here add that in the Sanscrit the simple (strong) aorists, or 
imperfect tenses in the participle, were represented by the 
reduplicating aorist or the perfect tense, while in the Greek 
they went further, and employed the suffix vans in two 
forms, — vdns (vd's), and vd'n, in both of which the suffixed 



38 

syllable received the accent, and the form vans was after- 
wards employed to express the strict idea of the perfect 
tense, and the other form van to express the aorist. This 
last form was applied both in the case of the reduplicating 
and the non-reduplicating aorists. Between these two forms 
of vans^ employed in the Greek, there is still another differ- 
ence. Although the stronger form vcinls (vas = w^) is made 
use of in the nominative singular of the masculine gender in 
those forms of the aorist which were afterwards used in the 
sense of the perfect tense, yet in all the oblique cases, and 
also in the nominative singular of the neuter gender, the 
weaker form vat (ot) is employed with the accent upon the 
suffix, while in the strong or second aorists the stronger 
form vant (vont) is preferred throughout in all cases of the 
masculine and neuter gender, with the accent also upon the 
suffix. These two forms, however, again agree in this, that 
both, in the feminine gender, give a preference to a shorter 
form, as in 7r67rot^[ /-]«?, 7re7rot^[Fiy][c7]Za, 7re7rot^[F]69, and 
ireTrt^l F]a)v [Sanscrit van], 7re'7rL^[F]ovo-a [Sanscrit fem. d.si' 
or oosee], 7r€7rL^[F]6v [Sanscrit van], Xa^[f](ovj Xa/3[F]ovaa, 
\afi[F]6v. The same derivation is very justly attributed by 
Mr. Bopp to the ending of the participle in the Slavonic 
perfect, where, indeed, according to him, the tense cor- 
responding to the Sanscrit and Greek perfect tenses (and to 
the Germanic preterite), has been lost in the indicative 
mood, as has been the case in the Lettic languages, but 
where, even as in the Lettic idioms, the form of the 
participle has been preserved, which had been generated 
from the perfect tense, before these languages had separated 
from the other members of the Arian stock. The root of 
,this suffix in the nominative and vocative cases of the three 
numbers of the masculine and neuter genders, and also in 
the accusative case of the dual, is vets' or us', the letter 5' of 
which, according to a law in this language, is suppressed in 
those cases of the singular number which do not receive 
any additions (compare Bopp, § 790, p. 156, and Prof. M. 
Rapp's Verbalorganism on the Old Slavonic, Bk. III., p. 
99, ff ). The original vav of this ending, in the Slavonic as 



39 

well as in other members of the Arian family (see Bopp, 
§ 822), passed also partly over into the liquid I; for, in addi- 
tion to this original participle of the active voice, there 
exists another participle in the Slavonic language, lu^ la, lo, 
which, with the auxiliaries, forms compound preterite tenses, 
and which, in the later northern tongues, replaces the entire 
preterite. But we cannot agree with Messrs. Bopp and 
Rapp,i who derive this I from an original d or t, instead of 
from the letter t?, which lies much nearer; and we wonder 
that Mr. Bopp, who very properly derives the Latin suffix 
lent in words such as corpulento, opulent-, vinolento, somno- 
lento, violento, temulento, instead of corpuvento, opuvent-, 
temuvento, from the Sanscrit vant, vas, vat, does not recog- 
nize it in this shortened form of the Slavonic perfect tense, 
where / in the place of v is evidently a later change of let- 
ters, which also occurs in the Georgian language, and where 
the accent is on the suffix, just as in the Sanscrit and the 
Greek. As regards the v, or digamma, it has disappeared 
from the Greek written language like the consonantal ^, and 
is found only in inscriptions and the writings of grammari- 
ans, yet in a great number of verbal forms, where it has not 
passed over into any other sound, its former existence may 
be inferred with sufficient certainty, so that there no longer 
remains any doubt as to the function of v in the formation 
of the perfect tense. We refer the reader to the examples 
furnished by Dr. Buttmann (§ 97, Obs. 10, and in other 
places), as, ^e^aprjco^;, K€Ka^TjQ)<;, /ce/cyiMyco?, «e^ap?;609, TreTrrijcof;, 
T6TL7)(o^, T6TXrjco<;, ire^vacTi, wecpvvla, yeydaa-t, yeydare, BeBdaac, 
fie/jbdaa-c, etc., instead of ^e^aprj F(a<;, KeKacprj Fa)<^, 7re<pv Facrc, 
fy ey d Fare, y ey a Faa-i, fjue/jud Faacv. The v, or digamma, how- 
ever, has not only been dropped, as in these and many other 
instances, but also makes its appearance again in the form 
of a hard breathing, as in ecnrepa, Lat. vesper, and therefore 
aspirates the preceding labials and gutturals, as rirvTrd {rer- 
VTrdfjL for TeTVir Fap), rirvcjia, ire'Trpay-d \Tre'TrpaydiJb\, 'jrk7rpa')(a. 
In other members of the Arian family also, it may be seen 

1 Professor Moriz Rapp's " Verbal-Organismus der Indo-Europaeischen 
Sprachen." Stuttgart: 1859. 



40 

that this h developed from v may be hardened into k or c, 
as in Latin, mV-, niv-s^ nic-s, nix; viv-^ viv-si, vic-si, vixi; 
conniv-f conniv-si, connic-si, connixi; nav-, Ags. 7iaca, nacho; 
Sanscr. clevdra^ Ags. tacor^ Old High Germ, zeihur, which 
makes zeihura equivalent to devdra. The v of the Gothic 
root quiva, nominative quiv-s, Sanscr. giva-s (living) corre- 
sponds to the Anglo-Saxon, directly descending from the 
Gothic, quick for quikk^ and to the High German quek. At 
all events, the fact that in the Greek language v through h 
passes over into A;, and thus that k may replace an original 
v^ will not be denied by the learned scholar; and from the 
above examples, which we have extracted from a list of Mr. 
Bopp's (§ 19), it may be clearly seen that this letter k can- 
not be regarded as inorganic. In this manner of forming 
the perfect tense the Greek coincides with the more archaic 
Latin, and the suffix of the perfect tense, which it has in 
common with other members of the Arian family, appears 
in this language not only in the ending lent^ which was 
treated of above, and where the letter v is replaced by / (op- 
ulent for opuvent, etc.), but it is also mediately or immedi- 
ately added to roots in the formation of adjectives, as vac-, 
vac-i[i = ay]-vo-, vos, vus, vac-vus, vacuus; noc-i-vus [i = ei 
= ay], 710C-VUS, nocuus ; conspic-vus, conspicuus; perpet-vus, 
perpetuus; contin-vus, continuus, etc. ; also cap-to-, cap-tus, 
capti-vus, like the Sanscrit uk-ta-van, in the indicative, sub- 
junctive, and infinitive moods of the perfect and in the 
future perfect; or it is added to verbal roots in the formation 
of tenses, — that is, preterite, perfect, and pluperfect tenses 
(as in the Slavonic and Sanscrit), where it is either followed 
by Ihe mere pronoun or by the substantive verb,^ and where 

* It is true that the Oscan forms pruffed, aamana-ffed, cnfcda-fed (see Mommsen 
Unteritalische Dialecte, p. 234), and the Umbrian pihafi, pihafei, Lat. piavi; am- 
brefurent, Lat. amhiverint (see Th. Aufrecht and A. KirchhofF Umbrische Denk- 
mdler, Vol. i. p. 144), are adduced in favor of the derivation of this suffix from 
<pva},fuo. But so far from admitting the validity of these proofs, on the strength 
of the facts advanced above, and seconded by Mr. Mommsen himself, we utterly 
reject the derivation of amavi from amafui, monui from monefai, audivi from 
audifui, and hold that the Oscan and Umbrian / and ff, in the above words, 
have been hardened from v, as has been done in other places, and especially in 



41 

the letter a (va^ vat) coalesces with the personal pronoun im^ 
which is shortened from am, vai from vaim^ first passed over 
into ei^ and finally into a long i (Engl, i in machine)^ and 
the final m at first began to be sounded very weak, and at 
last was dropped altogether. Finally, this theory is proved 
by the formation of the Vedic aorists in m, which have 
not yet been reduplicated, as badh-lm, I killed, kramlm, I 
mounted, instead of the later ah^adisham, akramisham. 



an adverb formed by means of this very suffix, statif for statute. If we even 
grant an original /in the Oscan and Umbrian, yet we are not authorized thereby 
to transfer this at once to the Latin, since each of these idioms, in many respects, 
has taken its own course. We are much rather inclined to thitik that the forms 
benurent, venurint, facnrent,fecerint, procanurint, procimierint, present an abridjred 
form of the suffixes v or va, ve; for if these forms are not for benverent, venverint, 
facverint, procanverint or -ent, there would not be a single trace of the perfect 
tense in these forms of the future perfect. 



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